Badgers
When I was wee, my family used to amuse ourselves in the interminable car journey down to Devon by counting the roadkill and guessing what it was. It was a somewhat macabre version of the iSpy books I had diligently filled in and was thus left with no more exciting things to look out for on the endless stretches of road.

"A badger!" I exclaimed, pointing out of the window with glee at a mutilated corpse on the hard shoulder.

"Don't be silly," my mum said, a smile playing at her lips, which at the age of seven I had failed to identify as I am going to troll my child for shits and giggles. "Badgers don't exist."

Imagine, if you will, the earth-shattering realisation that the world you thought you knew was a fiction. That those funny black-and-white big-rat animals were in fact entirely made-up. What else was untrue? I had already dealt, that year, with the discovery that Santa, God and the Tooth Fairy were lies. Was anything real any more?

I whimpered. "But that looked like a badger," I protested.

"They're pretend," my mum insisted. "Someone plants them on the roadside as a trick."

I accepted this. Following the Santa-revelation, I knew that if my mum told me something was imaginary, it probably was. Mistrust flickered. Was my mum one of those people who planted fake badger-corpses to maintain the deceit? It would be her style, the disingenuous cow.

For years, I took it to be true. Badgers weren't real. It stayed with me until my teenage years, when a chubby, awkward Queen of Cheesecake decided to show off her superiority by correcting someone who claimed to have seen a badger.

Trolling children for shits n' giggles is ace.
My nephew proudly informed his class one day that the Hoover Dam was built out of old vacuum cleaners - I was so proud.
(Je suis un vagabondis an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 2 Dec 2011, 15:36,
closed)